Thursday, September 16, 2010

New Millennium Capital Corporation

For resource hungry enterprises in Asia, Australian, Indonesian and natural resource assets from the Western Coast of North America have made the most sense.

Corus Steel, in the UK, part of the Tata Group has had to elsewhere to secure its supply of Iron Ore. The Tata group collectively with Corus is the 8th largest producer of steel in the world in large part due to the volume numbers of Corus.

The Tatas have exercised their option to fund and the development of the (Direct Shipping Ore) DSO mine owned by the listed New Millennium Capital Corporation. In return for bearing 80% of the cost of developing the mine, the Corus arm of the Tata Empire will buy all of the iron ore produced by the DSO mine near Schefferville, Quebec.

The Captive Mine

The mine is supposed to start in 2012 and produce 4 million tones of order over the course of its life of 10 years.

At a conservative $ 50 per ton of iron ore, New Millennium is looking at a top line of $ 2 billion from this project alone.

Market Pricing

I like the fact that there is no talk of preferential pricing and Tatas will be paying market price for the ore that they buy. Sure, there may be volatility along the way, but over the course of 10 years, the volatility should be mostly trending upwards.

Tata Ownership
The Tatas own 27.4% of New Millennium and have a stake in seeing the mine built and operate efficiently.

Potential Upside

This brings us to the Taconite project (with the LabMag and KeMag mines). The deposits in these mines are manifold than the DSO levels. The Tatas have until Dec 31, 2010 to signify their interest in this project.

Patient Capital

My personal style of investment is to invest in projects which have a gestation period. That allows an investor to come in while the project plant is being set up and the stock is out of the news for some time.

This also allows for investors to maximize the upside as they see the stock break out once production is imminent.

Sources

http://www.nmlresources.com/pdfs/FactSheet.pdf
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/tata-steel-securing-growth/408208/
http://www.livemint.com/2010/09/15232736/Tata-Steel-hedges-against-ore.html